Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Dangerous Demons: Vicious Circle

Another day another demon. 

This caper begins with Fix Castor, Exorcist of a spiritual nature, back in the office taking appointments.  He finds himself looking for a couple's daughter - well, her ghost at any rate.

From there the tale unfolds with multiple petals draped in the noxious fumes of decay.  Through some sleuthing and putting together a wildly farcical set of disparate clues, Fix finds himself up again to confront his nemesis Asmodeus, in a new and frightening form. 

Through sheer will and a betrayal of anything approaching love, Fix destroys himself to save the world.  Again.  And his friends too.

I thoroughly enjoy Mike Carey's second full length novel and his plot is perfect for a neo-noir approach to the private exorcist bit.

A little thinking about demons inhabiting flesh and inanimate objects.  If pulling demons from the aether and decanting them into objects work, it seems to me like a failure to have to bind a creature of another plane into the trappings of this one.  I cannot fault the logic of needing to protect the essence of another plane in this one I just think that it may be plausible in other forms - like how Jim Butcher presents ectoplasm as leaking into the verse their in in order to form "flesh" or really a container for essence.  I don't think you need to bind to flesh but I've never tried to raise a demon, so what do I know?

Vicious Circle 

Mike Carey
July 28, 2008
Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 978-0446618717

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